Past Exhibitions

Oct 18 2014

Writing Abstracts

18 October to 15 November 2014

Reception Saturday 18 October 2014, 6pm to 9pm

Christopher Lori, Jordan Seals Project

statement /Jordan Seal

For "Writing Abstracts" I express myself as poet and writer as well as visual artist. Instead of allowing the poetry and writing to remain static, limited by ordinary typeface and boring typography, it is transformed, brought to the realm of visual arts. There is no need to remain docile under the conformity of typewriters, word processors, and printers. In this body of work I embrace tactile pleasures and wild possibilities of pens, brushes, markers, knives. The individual and idiosyncratic free nature of hand writing is exploited and pushed, its eccentricities developed to revel in the beauty of writing. Each letter is individual, formed freely in a stream. A modern calligraphic style is formed, one that meets the needs of its creator, that fits within a devotion to the abstract and surreal. A spiritual practice where the contemplative exercise of writing and the creative wonder of drawing are married together. It furthers the cause to embrace All Art. All unfolds to fulfill aesthetic unity and the purity of creation.

statement / Christopher Lori

oil on panel or canvas / love supreme for a dead regime / (sculpting in oil)

or I can however offer some formal observations on the current and recent demands the work makes of me. or recent resumption of oil completely monopolized the direction of my production, in a most “attributes of the medium” sculptural tone.

Recent work seems sonorous to my Interest in clerical and monastic elements of medieval art and Roman fresco.

The aesthetic of surface-noise nostalgia with its measured erosion, and relentless images of scholastic meditation attract and seduce me. I seem to force this attrition with application of oil as much as within the strange beauty of terrain.

Art clean via Isolation, secular in its archaic devotion, seduction in full swing / the three Graces in a world where life is cheap. Influences surrounding my arena of consumption are admittedly mostly contaminated projections. Need, desire and the limits of articulation determine my relation with value of beauty. How it propagates what is referenced outside those doors,… you tell me.

acrylic on paper / tore / (erasure by lacerations) Wrought by concerns of line quality and structure, these works are my most formally built and narratively remote in years.

When the midi-tone result of charcoal erasure lacked the pure contrast needed, laceration or exfoliation was in order. Resorting to a reverse opacity for erasure, I began ripping up thin surface layers of the paper, exposing the white to re-articulate the black line via sort of erosion. An addiction quickly set for the resulting stress of scrubbed or impasto acrylic, islanding course rivers of white. This technique fulfils a caustic, elemental usage my established relationship with raw charcoal has left me demanding of other mediums.

charcoal on paper / clean salvage / (not to draw my drawings) or when my mind becomes jealous of the quality of the marks I’ve made unconsciously in the periphery of my vision. or what to do when the sight of a marks intent made to consciously begins to sicken me.

The body of work in the Exhibition “Clean Salvage”, has been built through a process of elimination and displacement. The displacement occurs by forcing whatever medium used into areas outside my focal point while working in another direction entirely. When sufficient material has been sculpted and layered in these peripheries, the focus is then placed on these residual areas to be cut away and valued for their own potential independence. There can be no “no” answer to the risk questions of whether to pull the knife out separating deserving grounds. In this way culling formal purities occurring randomly on a level almost beyond psychology in the making. These margin follow-throughs, bleeds and residuals, make for beautifully unconscious less drawn less built “graphica”.